Goducate … Go And Educate! – Page 89 – Helping Asians Help Themselves

2013-12-242013-12-26

Goducate’s Sing Your English program is well received in Cambodia

Goducate has been developing a Sing Your English (SYE) program to teach English to children in Indonesia. To test whether the program would be well received in countries where English is hardly heard, we took it to Myanmar in November, where we found that the children (and even their parents) took to the songs, and were soon able to sing them without accompanying music.

As a further test, early this month we tried it out in Cambodia. A group of Singaporeans who went to the Goducate Children’s Home for the opening of the new boys’ dorm brought the program to two of the villages where staff and the older children from the Home go to teach English.

For the children in the villages, the program was entirely different from the conventional type of classes they attend in school. SYE is conducted in a way that allows children to have fun while learning English, and without the stress of having to sit tests and do homework. Accompanying the songs were actions, games, and also prizes. The children enjoyed themselves and could be heard singing on their way home.

Not only that, but a dental team from Singapore that visited the Home and the villages a couple of weeks later found the village kids still singing the songs.

Students in village school learning SYE song

2013-12-202014-06-09

Vermicomposting project gets underway in villages near Goducate Training Center

Goducate believes that backyard gardening is very helpful for poor communities. It gives them a steady supply of food, and the money saved on the vegetables they grow can then be used for something else. And if they plant a variety of vegetables, they can get a supply not just of fibre and vitamins, but also of proteins as well. Good compost is essential for good crops. When African night crawler worms are left to feed on a suitable mixture of vegetable material, they produce such compost.

The trainees at the Goducate Training Center get their practical training in the neighboring villages. They have started a vermicomposting project, whereby one household in each village is given a quantity of worms to start making the compost. Once vermicompost has been made in that pilot household, the trainees will encourage the neighbors to embark on vermicomposting as well. The worms multiply fast (they can double in quantity in a month), so a household can soon be passing on worms to other households. When most of the households are able to make vermicompost, Goducate will introduce organic farming across the communities.

So far the project has been started in 3 villages, in some of which several households are already doing vermicomposting.

Vermibed in blue containers supplied by Goducate Training Center

2013-12-172014-06-09

Goducate Training Center trainees help neighbors

The Goducate Training Center (GTC) in Iloilo trains people to be community development workers — ie, people who go out to needy communities, to identify their needs, and to identify leaders within the community who can lead projects that Goducate sets up to meet needs. The community development workers also have to be very hands-on in the projects they help to set up, and in the kinds of help they offer to individuals.

The trainees get their practical training in the villages around GTC. At the moment they are in 10 of the surrounding villages. The help they offer ranges from chopping up firewood for or giving massages to very old people, to screening for hypertension, to helping children catch up with school work through regular remedial classes, to training people in simple livelihood skills, to agricultural projects such as backyard farming or pig rearing.

One of the livelihood projects was training in massage. In one of the villages 4 people have been trained how to give massages. Another livelihood skill being taught is how to make choco-balls and yema (a Filipino caramel candy made with egg yolks and condensed milk) with moringa (a plant with many nutrients) for sale in schools. The recipe for including moringa in yema is still being tweaked to get the right taste and quality.